Heads or Tails
by Enchantress of the Dawn
Summary: Life lessons don't always teach you for the better. Sometimes how you react, is more important than how you learn. All it took was seventeen years, the right friends and one certain girl for Uchiha Sasuke to realize that there are two sides to every coin.
1. Prologue: A Gale of Crimson

_Prologue: A Gale of Crimson._

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**_Every action has a consequence._**

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Hazes of grey clouded the sky above. Abundant hails of water in the shape of bullets plummeted mercilessly at the black ridged roof tiles, ricocheting off the metallic frame atop the house. The raindrops were together a minuscule monsoon that flooded numerous miniature craters in the cemented terrain, as it water-logged through all the Earth it touched. The wind elevated in a violent gale, gyrating in forlorn spirals, colliding with each other in destructive friction. A slamming door belted against the faded white slabs of the walls. The broken handle creaked, its screws liberated as they came loose, as it dropped to the solid dirt with a silent thud.

A loud grotesque scratching scythed along the metallic titanium of a silver Honda, creating a jagged scar across the abandoned vehicle. The door's slamming ceased, as the car veered, hoisted by the wind, skidding to catch the aged wood. The front windshield had been shattered. Dozens of glass specks were scattered, as if they had been thrown from a violent impact in all directions. The Honda's bonnet was twisted; mashed into numerous razor sharp edges that stuck out, as if it had been pulverized by the invincible wall. The agitated mistral thrashed against the unharmed trunk of the Honda, threatening to lift it off its black tar-covered tires.

Soil was dispersed from the beige ledge of the building to the lion's share of dirt dumped in a heap, where the dead leaves and rose colored flowers of a once healthy hibiscus plant were now sprawled from a demolished bisque vase. Two airbags were disparaged in the front seats, acting as protectors to cushion the head of any unfortunate victims. The Honda, void of any life, had acquired an unorthodox thrashing from the rapidly vigorous cyclone. It was almost flamboyant; in the theatrical sense that the vehicle's sustained damage was undeniably irreparable. One of the airbags had subsequently achieved its purpose. With the lock keeping the car door permanently sealed, and the car keys nowhere in sight, the window to the opposite of the driver's side had been rolled down almost fully.

The vehicle was abandoned; but the house was not.

A hushed whimpering ensued from within the house's interior. The landscape around the crash site was nothing but endless green fields, soaked grass being battered in the weather, with no visible animals. Those mammals were elsewhere- somewhere far away, stacked inside barns where they wouldn't be harmed by the storm. Warm enough only to be irritated and terrorized by the wind bashing against the sides of their refuge. Inside the miniature cottage croft, a small infant could not be so prosperous. Huddled in a corner, underneath a wooden desk that provided additional asylum to the child's restless mind, the boy appeared to be around six or five.

_"Don't argue with me. Run inside."_

He had been conflicted; his instinct adhered his feet to the ground, attempting to stubbornly mold himself there. Yet, it was his futile pleas to stay that made her kind onyx eyes soften. It was her plea that shook him. That made his inexperienced, vulnerable heart sting enough to surrender. Even though he was too young to fully comprehend what she was really saying. His tiny pale hands were bruised purple, desperately grasping the car mirror, so the wind wouldn't steal him. She had begged him. It was something she had never done. Anguish ruled out his eyes as the perplexity did in hers. His eyes were just a smaller, less rounded version of hers.

_"Please, Sasuke."_

Her words haunted his mind. The infant had given in to her wishes and scurried to the front door before the deathtrap their Honda had become could claim him. Before he entered, he looked back at her. As the gale shook the car, she smiled at him, but refused to come inside herself to comfort him. So here he was, trembling beneath on old blanket he found thrown to the side. His ribs stung, bruises certain to form just before the countless quantity of cuts and scratches disappeared. Sasuke almost sprung from his place when a large gust clashed against the wall from outside. His nimble fingers clung to the roots of his short, spiky raven-colored hair. Unknown to him, red was stained on a white jumper he wore, long since dried in.

But in was not his blood.

A putrescent stench permeated the air, wafting from the abhorrent sight. Dark crimson washed in with the pelleting rain. The wind had thrown her forcibly from the driver's seat. The previous eyes that looked so kind had turned cold, dead from the light. Long locks of raven hair cascaded across the dull road, some of it tied in knots caught in clots of red from a head injury. Her ankle was crooked, the white matter of bone sticking out from where the joints met in her leg. Her skin was decaying; turning rotten and blue as slowly deteriorated from its ivory color. Her leg had been stuck in the car; If she could not get out safely, at least she had made her son do so.

It was his mother's blood.

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**_Dreams are required to escape the cruelties of reality._**

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><p><strong>Note: The first chapter of this story was used as a short story for my Higher English, with the names of the characters changed and the quotes removed. I will be continuing this story from this week and onwards and have a fourth chapter half-finished.<strong>


	2. Chapter One: Master Of Rejection

_Chapter One: Master of Rejection._**  
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**_Time does not always heal scars._**

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_Uchiha Mikoto_

_Tuesday, 1st June, 1969 - Friday, 18th October, 2002_

August was fast approaching. Soon the Summer would be a bygone, and School would flood with freshmen as the Fall began with a new year. Uchiha Mikoto's broken body now lay lifeless within an ashen gray coffin, entombed deep beneath the Earth in the graveyard of St. Rose Church, as it had been for twelve despondent years. The white marble of her furbished gravestone was smooth, her name delicately inscribed in the center, with three small roses modestly etched into the marble above her written identity. While most deceased members of the Uchiha family carved an Uchiha fan on their graves, Mikoto proved to be more original. Positioned with prodigious care upon the soil in front of the stone, was a white moon lily and one such red rose inside a simple but deficient black vase with a blue bow tied around it.

She was thirty three when that morbid cyclone killed her. If the raven-haired humanitarian were still here, she would be dissimulating about her archaic senescence, though she would only be forty five. Mikoto's physical maturity, when she still breathed, was always behind her adept mentality anyway. When she had endured the capricious era of adolescence, she was brazenly mistaken as a decade old lad by any who did not know of her. Though she had been a late bloomer, the rest of the females her age had already mellowed to all the beauty they would ever have.

Abruptly, a devastating mountain of abundance had been dropped onto him. Once a boy of five winters, now a near man of seventeen. He was taller; a cold facade blocked whatever thoughts executed through his head. His posture straight and his head held high in masculine pride. Shoulders strong and a muscular chest indicted infrequent and arduous hours at the gym. Sasuke had become an enigmatic and perplexing being in his dark fastidious and intractable ways of life. Even his open-minded ways of expression were lethargic at best. His ankle sized dress boots were newly polished; from the spiked crown of his untamed hair to the delicate apex of his foot, he was dressed in black attire. Aside from the casual white t-shirt beneath a black leather jacket, his footwear, dungarees and wristwatch were all the same color. The Uchiha himself might as well have been a collage of shaded charcoal that contrasted to his pale ivory complexion.

He veered down onto his knees, clasping in his grip a soft brush, as he carefully rid the pristine marble of newly formed grit, being careful not to scour against the unscathed headstone. By now, one could call him an ingenious expert in cleaning marble. He had long ago marked a permanent mental note in his cerebrum to never use a wire brush, else he would end up damaging the stone face with multiple scratches, which would be religiously disrespectful to his departed mother. He also never used vinegar, or lemon, or literally anything soapy. As the calcium within the marble would dissolve with anything remotely acidic.

It was a quiet Saturday; the hours had rapidly elapsed and not so much as an inaudible pin had dropped around him. Usually, he came on his lonesome after school, or on the morning of a day there were no academic lessons. Every day, without inadequacy, he had visited since her burial. Even when his family used to go on vacation, he stubbornly never left. The last time they attempted to usher him abroad was on his eleventh birthday, where he narrowed his eyes and blocked their forced smiles through years of suppressed pain and even let him choose the destination. He had declined.

Some people, most who had known Sasuke all their lives, whether from school or as acquaintances of the rather populous family, commented that the day Uchiha Mikoto's light expelled so did the childish innocence and audacious impishness in the pupils of her once glowing son. That the experience of seeing all that blood would have done the same to them, if they too had seen it. That he held inside of him all the preserved anger that would one day explode like an indistinguishable masquerade of emotion fueled flames, releasing the child that screamed within to be freed. That he was the only one yet to have an emotional meltdown. That he would be better for it. None of them ever said it to his face, though, perhaps because they dared not to.

"Of course you would be here."

The youngest Uchiha didn't have to turn his head to recognize the voice of his elder brother. Uchiha Itachi had been nine when he became the pillar for a broken family. A decade and two years later, he was at the start of his prime as a twenty one year old. Itachi was the only one who still attempted to treat him like he was the old Sasuke; like he wasn't impudent or selfish. As if he almost had some decent features to make up for the unlimited amount of flaws he carried within his hapless being.

"She's not coming back, Sasuke."

His brother spoke again when his own silence spoke volumes. His tone was sullen; a brooding gloom rung through his words, agonizing his own feeble heart more so than the words were meant for. Like her, Itachi had been blessed with the same raven locks their mother had. Like her, Itachi held the same intense, scorching warmth inside his obsidian eyes as their mother had. Sasuke, once upon a time, had all of that too. He still did. Except that his eyes now resembled something much darker: an endless abyss into a world with no color and no recognition behind the word life.

"I know that even better than you do."

It was Sasuke who retorted. His cruel sentence spat virulence on his brother's empathetic tone, filled with nothing more than malevolence. Who was Itachi to understand the hopelessness a mere child had endured when he could do nothing but quiver, distraught from the horrific gale his mother's body lay in? The same body now lay in a coffin, buried directly beneath their feet, dwindling away to disintegrated skeleton. With naught left to respond with but a disheartened sigh, Itachi glanced down to the younger, foolish brother on his knees. Knowing he wouldn't be able to come to his aid if he kept being shut out. And it would take one hell of a person to do so. Maybe he had lost all hope.


	3. Chapter Two: Steel Glances

_Chapter Two: Steel Glances._

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**One should be judged. Not for who he is, but for what he has done.**

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"I'm not like _that_."

He spoke in a pitiless monotone, irritated. Sasuke's latent enjoyment of their asinine colloquy, demeaning from his perspective, would remain as an obdurate humiliation for as long as he could meticulously recall it. He empathized his last word in spite, duly denying absurd rumors that had first been circulated by a sophomoric clique of inordinately raunchy boys blaming their failure to get action from the mass female population on whomever they could.

The Uchiha was drawn by dilated eyes, a lighter shade than his own. The boy stood before him frozen stiff, fixed to the cinereal gravel of the small courtyard the two stood alone in. A crude chill of polar biting air nipped sharply at the boy's back, briskly tensing up his spinal cord. The boy's throat parched dry, a bitter emptiness churning sickness in his stomach, digging tightly into his ribs, clenching at his panicking insides like the keen-edged talons of a steadfast eagle. The veins on his arms were visibly constricted, appearing a grim mauve as the arteries transferred below the surface of his skin.

It wasn't that he had said it; It was how he had said it. The unforgiving bluntness of Uchiha Sasuke that signified profoundly how much he indubitably could not care. Perhaps, though, that was what he admired about the Uchiha above all else. From the few words that passed the sealed lips of the Uchiha, none of them were ever tolerable lies, nor extraneous half-truths. He was an unabashed character with a brutally honest personality. There were no floundering, dynamic speeches sugar coated by pretty words. No 'Let's be friends.' No 'It's not you, it's me.'

"I-I see. Sorry for bothering you, Sasuke-san."

Branches loomed above their heads. Numerous verdigris spiraling leaves sprouting out in diversified directions, casting gaunt and linear shadows across the achromatic dirt. A statuesque oak tree stood on its lonesome, fairly aged in its time. From its extensive lanky bark, it displayed itself to be at least a millennium old, robust and burnished dark brown. The oak had been exuberant in its growth span from the soil since before the high school was built around it.

"_Sai_. There's more people on the left side."

Both were aware of the students that gathered around them, enclosing them in an almost full circle. Not in vicinity of the courtyard, but peering through the transparent windows as though it acted as a veil, providing them cover from plain sight. As though they had covertly hidden themselves and camouflaged into the walls. The white corridors were lit brilliantly in the style of a hospital. Except medical institutions were immaculate and spacious.

He realized now that it was impeccably ludicrous of him for not waiting. He had an entire day of lessons to endure. He could have subsequently tried after school instead. No matter how infamously popular the Uchiha, or how he cruelly received such a heartless rejection, he believed that Sasuke wouldn't tell another living soul if they had been alone. He wasn't sure if it was because his confession was not important enough to mock. Or if, within an impenetrable exterior, Sasuke might just be nice.

Indicating between the two possible exits, the left door was the callous passageway to the main crowd of Sai's tormentors. He offered an attentive smile to the Uchiha, before he spun on his shoes and dragged himself to the opposite door. He imitated the best fraudulent smiles. He had faced so many dauntings that he scantily knew what authentic happiness felt like. Both doors contained hallways full of people. Both sides contained bullies.

It was as blatant as it was he felt lurid and numb. Deep down, he had already known. The widely misplaced rumors of Uchiha Sasuke's sexuality were predominantly false. No person who unfortunately had been rejected could deny there had been the simplest bit of hope inside them that their feelings could have been returned. Sai's eyes downcast to the ground, his face devoid of his normal complexion. Naturally, he had been conceived and brought into the forsaken world as pale as a vampire. His cheeks were just never so white that they were this pasty.

"Ha, as if Sasuke would like him even if he were _gay_!"

"The homo got _rejected_!"

"Poor guy, guess he can't blame the way he was _born_."

All he could do was confront the negative afflictions his peers deemed him with a steel glance. Everywhere he would walk, judgmental thoughts and words would ultimately follow through. His pace was brought to a desperate power walk from the unwelcomed whispers and bewildered faces around him. Some few silent onlookers had submerged themselves into convenient corners, concealing themselves amidst an unsympathetically brutal crowd, giving him redundant expressions of pity even though they weren't willing to allot their assistance.

He heeded them none of his attention. Bullies picked out victims who were the weakest source, because the weakest source was likely to give them an interesting reaction. Therefore, the only reaction he would permit himself to reward anyone was silence. Even as his eyes marginally stung, and he tempted himself to break out into a demented run. Even a humane jog would suffice to entertain their yet growing boredom.

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"Sakura-chan! Can I have a hug?!"

Of his own limitless peril, he was moronic enough to adamantly pursue the object of his perplexing affection that was purely an instinctual attraction that staunchly drew him. He was a tanned boisterous male with sun-kissed shaggy hair and cerulean blue eyes that doggedly chased after her like an inexperienced and newly born canine that had just been cultured on how to wag his tail. She had grown accustomed to his weighty pledge to never be so disloyal as to peep at another "specimen of the woman species," as he directly put it. He was candid in all of his unaccomplished advances to claim her as his.

"Not until you start looking like Norman Reedus."

Daryl Dixon was her dream man. No other competent fighter in _The Walking Dead_ could attain so much naturally talented diversity that they could use a bow and knife with such precision, yet handle a gun so flawlessly. He certainly was no perfect man, yet he was perfect in his valiant and concealed imperfections. He was mysterious: even his own brother couldn't fathom his complex personality after becoming so immensely attached to the rest of the group. Most fan girls of the show were proud Darylcrats and she was no contrary exception. Daryl didn't wear sleeves to show off the hulking muscle on his forearms, and she was openly protective of his flexing veins.

"Who's he?"

The haunting silence that followed could resonate a pin descending to the concrete, the air distilled with an eerie gauntlet of uncordial moorings as if she had been trampled on. Sakura shied away from the surrogate of WD non-believers in her mind. It wasn't like her heart was racing to threaten a homicide, she was just reasonably irked a boy that persistently stalked her so much didn't even know of the best damndest television series that ever occurred to her in her else humane and normal life.

"Sounds like you'll never get a hug now."

"Why not, Sakura-chan?!"

"Stick to chatting up girls who like romcoms."

"I've never watched one."

"Start."

The blonde was discombobulated; the neurons of his brain didn't function enough to fully comprehend their conversation. He could only blame it on the bipolar syndromes that seemed to woefully drive the emotional hormones within deplorable members of the wrought and angered female species. The Haruno girl, however, was one such rare woman species worth rescuing.

One undeniable reason for this was her unique hair: the long nurtured locks cascaded down her back, bouncing as she marched off in four inch heeled boots. The sun caught in through the window, shimmering off the radiant strands of pink. Dyed or not, the color closely resembled that of a dozen flying cherry blossoms spiraling around the magnificent women as she lawfully strode. His inexplicable yearning for her drove him on after all her callous let downs.

.

.

.

.

"How could a movie with Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson only be rated two 'effing stars on Netflix?!"

His words dripped with sarcasm. It was a grueling outrage that he determinedly watched it. The blonde gingerly cringed his teeth together as he mocked Netflix's rating system. He dipped his head back into the couch, cerulean eyes met with the bland beige of the stolid ceiling that held a roof over his head. To no avail did he truthfully understand the complexities of the female brain enough to comprehend why Sakura was even mildly into romantic comedies. The pinkette must be dangerously besotted and scatterbrained to sit through a dull film with a such a blatant lack of action. He mourned for every sorrowful hour Sakura had been indolently perturbed enough to waste her significantly meaningful life on them. The time she stood on this Earth should be less allusive.

"Why are you watching a chick flick anyway, Naruto?"

His mother's interruption was graciously welcomed as he thankfully hit the cursed pause button on the remote. The mortifying movie _How do you know _seemed to be dexterously ongoing and full of nothing but senseless conflict and romance between a cliched love triangle. It was futile she would never end up with Owen who had to be the _jerk_ character, which only worsened Naruto's vague but wholesomely gruesome experience of the romcom genre. Even if he himself got the unlikely chance to modify more guns and zombies into the movie, it would be a dead cause.

"Sakura-chan recommended I watch films of this genre."

"Sakura... -_chan_?"

"My _future _girlfriend."

The woman openly rolled her equally cerulean pupils to her son's excessive lack of indirectness. To Naruto's credit, his own father wasn't much of a flirtatious stud either. Uzumaki Kushina would not to leave her disillusioned son to dot on his unrealistic fantasies. "The way to woo a high school girl is not through arrogant bluntness, Naruto. Only with a semblance of masculine charm and a distant mysteriousness, will you ever tickle the fancy of a blossoming woman you could rank 10/10."

"Tickle the fancy of a blossoming woman?!"

Kushina was enthusiastically vicarious to educate her baffled son in the compelling teachings of the irresistible player she had been before her heartbreaking times were conclusively conquered for her to settle down with a man. She would be the indestructible asset to turn around Naruto's woman flaws, even if he was too regretfully slow to pick up what she really meant as of the fleeting moment.

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**_Infatuation should not be mistaken for love._**_**  
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	4. Chapter Three: What Cannot Be Unseen

_Chapter Three: What Cannot be Unseen._

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** Such images could not be forgotten.**

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Rivulets of the sun's dawn glared him down, effectively blinding him via a chintzy window that was stained from the dust-ridden Earth stuck to it, as though it had been hygienically unkempt from a protracted sense of time before the Honda skidded off road from black ice and the increased winds. For some sleep-induced moments, he forgot. His pale hands, too small and dainty for a man, regretfully strained himself to escape the warming comforts of the battered and worn blanket he had just scarcely been restful in. Ankles weak and shaking, he bravely managed to steady himself enough to stand, ducking beneath the wood of his additional shelter. The room which had provided him its asylum without his pleading was nearly bare, void of any furniture beyond the rickety desk he had dwelled beneath.

It had been evening yesterday when he had shot the developing muscles in his legs to scamper inside, before the cyclone could fiercely upsurge to batter him like the devastated metal of the car such weather had razed. Now, however, the air was still. Sasuke could only but hear the thudding of his own pulse. And just as sudden, he already yearned to flee back into his corner beneath the thin material of a third-class duvet, to steepen there and remain a part the wall. Somewhere into the night, after hours of convulsing into himself and shivering, he had cried out for her.

That was when he remembered. It baffled the child to comprehend the intuitive motion that urged him to head outside, to throw his lillyputian-sized self back into the Frey of the possible dangers lurking outside. It dawned on him that he was alone. No one could protect him. No one else was around. Significantly, his strength was microscopic to a gale, as he had learned. Gravity couldn't always protect him either. Narrow, gaunt veins shook in his hand. He also direly yearned to know. He couldn't be alone. Not when she had only ushered him inside yesterday. Perhaps she preferred the confines of the vehicle to protect her. The little Uchiha had always teased his Mother's silliness. She was strange. Closer to nature than the households that protected her, always. His father, on many bounteous occasions, had rolled back his eyes when speaking of her extreme protectiveness. That must have been why. Why she would usher him on inside, onyx pupils uncomprehending to his own, holding a smile that never reached those eyes of joy and kindness.

He knew, though. He didn't know what he knew, couldn't understand it, couldn't let it not baffle his vulnerable pitting stomach. He denied it. But, somehow, he _knew_ it. Just that feeling. The one that had lurked since he last saw the giddy mother that conceived and loved her son. Her silliness. He felt empty, something numbing through his chest, though it hurt like a hardening nail pinning him to the cottage croft. Tears welted at his eyes, a draft of frigid and iced goosebumps aching the bare visible hairs on his neck to stand- algid and horrified. The urge to succumb to his fear was very real, just to ease back into his corner and do nothing. But he had to do something.

He had to know.

His sneakers skimped across stained carpet, brushing the rim of black with the soles of his shoes. He wasn't walking; everything held him back. His knees were flaccid to push toward the ground, tempted to drop toward spindly weakening ankles and descend with gravity to the floor. Gravity- his only friend, it seemed, as of the moment. Raven locks spun at the front, stunned by little more than a breeze, spooked. A breeze that could transform into something more monstrous, more robust. He had opened the door.

The stench was unforgiving. The buzzed wriggling of something small- dozens of creatures feasting. And, on that day, his eyes grew wide. On that day, Uchiha Sasuke's innocence was no more. His heart tainted, his eyes scorned. _Silly mother_, he had merely thought before he had stepped out. _She'll be fine_. He dropped to his knees, succumbing the fearful adrenaline he had been determined to give in to. And then, his flaccid knees dropped to the ground. His temptation was absolute- succeeding to break the fear in his spindling ankles. For Gravity, his only friend, let the weakness soar limp throughout his entire body. Not caring of the cuts he gained when his chin hit rock bottom concrete, when all he could focus on was red.

_"Please, Sasuke."_

The earthed stains on the window were not the dark stains on the concrete. An unrecognizable corpse was sprawled before him. Recognizable enough. Such things cannot be unseen. He couldn't bring himself to look away from the sight of the maggots that dived for her flesh, eagered and glad to be feeding on the rotting flesh of her limbs and her body. Larva simply enjoying a meal, wormed up the graying bone that pierced from her ankle. From her dead skin, his haplessness pried at himself mentally. Emotionally, he was scarred. Physically, he could not tremble. His eardrums thundered, his taste grew metallic. Such things cannot be unseen. The sun that hit his back with warmth was cold. Only now, he became aware of his own jumper.

Not his blood. His mother's.

Only then, and only then, could he comprehend. His mother's eyes- kind and onyx. Obsidian and joyful. He would not remember her for the way she wished to be remembered by both her children especially, and everyone else. Fugaku, Itachi... they would. They didn't see what he saw. Could never feel his inevitable helplessness. His eyes forever widened, and his body forever frozen, unable to shed a tear. Because he could not unsee. Shrill, and deep. Pathetic, yet terrifying. It climbed from his toes to his crowned mass of raven hair. Simply, the undeniable. His lips gaped, then swallowed. And when he threw himself back, he threw himself forward. For his limbs to sting, so absolute, they tore apart from his body. For the hurling smash of his mentality to smack his head off the grey, no thought in his mind. For the hollering scream of his outcrying, wrenching throat to permeate the silenced air.

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** Such images could not be forgotten.**

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